Blog Post

Will online video kill the TV star? That’s the question panelists tried to answer during the Video Advertising panel at Digital Hollywood. “The TV and movie industries have a value chain — grips, actors, screenwriters, etc. What do we do in our industry so it doesn’t get decimated like it has with newspapers or music?” asked Steve Robinson, president of video ad firm Panache.

Responses varied, of course, but the consensus was that there was no way the TV industry would survive in its current form:

The least optimistic was Kevin Yen, YouTube’s director of strategic partnerships: “Industries evolve, there’s consolidation and things change. We need to develop the economics that support this current model. We can

Ã¢Â€ÂœWeÃ¢Â€Â™re trying to get more out of our existing talent and burn through less resources"… apparently by not paying the actors for their appearances on the web if the new deal with SAG goes through….

Videopoet, "The future is the re-editing of tv material, mashing it up, putting it to music in places, putting advertising into the mash…" That's what the smut business has been doing for 14 years on the web and even before the with movies and cable… one shoot has 15 cuts for different markets… it's time NBC and the rest caught up with that.

Back of the envelope math. 111m HUTs. TV revenues (network, syndie, local, etc) of $70-100b. That's about $750 per HUT that could be going away. There's no way Google search ads on YouTube or PSAs on Hulu or FLO will replace that.